His Temperament and Character   The Battle of Life   But what strange ideas again —  that I was born with a supramental temperament and had never any brain or mind or any acquaintance with human mentality —  and that I know nothing of hard realities. Good God! my whole life has been a struggle with hard realities, from hardship and semi-starvation in England through the fierce difficulties and perils of revolutionary leadership and organisation and activity in India to the far greater difficulties continually cropping up here in Pondicherry, internal and external. My life has been a battle from its early years and is still a battle, —  the fact that

Part Two   His Sadhana or Practice of Yoga     Section One   Sadhana before Coming to Pondicherry in 1910   Ordinary Life and Yoga   Faith and Knowledge   Is it true that only those who have obtained a clear knowledge of their spiritual possibility through a definite glimpse, received by the Grace of the Divine, are able to stick to the path till the end?   At least I had no such glimpse before I started Yoga. I can't say about others —  perhaps some had —  but the glimpse could only bring faith, it could not possibly bring knowledge; knowledge comes by Yoga, not be

Chapter VI   The National Evolution of Poetry   THE WORK of the poet depends not only on himself and his age, but on the mentality of the nation to which he belongs and the spiritual, intellectual, aesthetic tradition and environment which it creates for him. It is not that he is or need be entirely limited or conditioned by his environment or that he must regard himself as only a voice of the national mind or bound by some past national tradition and debarred from striking out a novel and original road of his own. In nations which are returning under difficulties to a strong self-consciousness, like the Irish or the Indians at the present mom

Chapter V   Poetic Vision and the Mantra   THIS HIGHEST intensity of style and movement which is the crest of the poetical impulse in its self-expression, the point at which the aesthetic, the vital, the intellectual elements of poetic speech pass into the spiritual, justifies itself perfectly when it is the body of a deep, high or wide spiritual vision into which the life-sense, the thought, the emotion, the appeal of beauty in the thing discovered and in its expression — for all great poetic utterance is discovery, — rise on the wave of the culminating poetic inspiration and pass into an ecstasy of sight. In the lesser poets these moments are

'The Future Poetry' by Sri Aurobindo - Page 1 of 10 Chapter II   The Essence of Poetry   WHAT THEN is the nature of poetry, its essential law? what is the highest power we can demand from it, what the supreme music that the human mind, reaching up and in and out to its own widest breadths, deepest depths and topmost summits, can extract from this self-expressive instrument? and how out of that does there arise the possibility of its use as the mantra of the Real? Not that we need spend any energy in a vain effort to define anything so profound, elusive and indefinable as the breath of poetic creation; to take the myriad-stringed harp of Saraswati to pieces for t

Chapter III   Rhythm and Movement    THE MANTRA, poetic expression of the deepest spiritual reality, is only possible when three highest intensities of poetic speech meet and become indissolubly one, a highest intensity of rhythmic movement, a highest intensity of interwoven verbal form and thought-substance, of style, and a highest intensity of the soul's vision of truth. All great poetry comes about by a unison of these three elements; it is the insufficiency of one or another which makes the inequalities in the work of even the greatest poets, and it is the failure of some one element which is the cause of their lapses, of the scoriae in their work

Chapter IV    The Soul of Poetic Delight  and Beauty   THE LIGHT of truth, the breath of life, great and potent things though they are, are insufficient to give poetry the touch of immortality and perfection, even a little of which is enough to carry it safe through the ages, unless the soul and form of delight and beauty take possession of the seeing of truth and give immortality to the breath and body of the life. Delight is the soul of existence, beauty the intense impression, the concentrated form of delight; and these two fundamental things tend to be one for the mind of the artist and the poet, though they are often enough separated in

Chapter XII    The Course of English Poetry ­ 4   IN THE work of the intellectual and classical age of English poetry, one is again struck by the same phenomenon that we meet throughout, an extraordinary force for achievement limited by a characteristic defect which turns in the actual execution to half-success or a splendid failure. A big streak of rawness somewhere, a wrong turn of the hand or an imperfect balance of the faculties wastes the power spent and makes the total result much inferior to what it should have been with so much nerve of energy to speed it or so broad a wing of genius to raise it into the highest empyrean heights. The min

Chapter XV    The Movement of Modern  Literature ­ 2   OUT OF the period of dominant objective realism what emerges with the strongest force is a movement to quite an opposite principle of creation, a literature of pronounced and conscious subjectivity. There is throughout the nineteenth century an apparent contradiction between its professed literary aim and theory and the fundamental unavoidable character of much of its inspiration. In aim throughout, — though there are notable exceptions, — it professes a strong objectivity. The temper of the age has been an earnest critical and scientific curiosity, a desi

Chapter XXI    Recent English Poetry ­ 2   THE EFFECTIVE stream of poetry in the English tongue has followed no such strong distinctive turn as would be able to sweep the effort of rhythmic expression along with it in one mastering direction. The poets of this age pursue much more even than their predecessors the bent of their personality, not guided by any uniting thought or standard of form, and have no other connecting link than the subtle similarities which the spirit of the age always gives to its work of creation. But the present age is so loose, fluid and many-motived that this subtler community is not easily tangible and works out in much